Microsoft, Facebook to jointly build subsea cable for faster internet

Microsoft and Facebook have joined hands to build a new, state-of-the-art subsea cable across the Atlantic Ocean that will help meet the growing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for cloud and online services for Microsoft, Facebook and their customers.

The 6,600 km MAREA cable will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic - eight fibre pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160 Tbps, the companies said in a statement on Friday.

The construction of the cable will commence in August 2016 and is expected to be completed in October 2017.

“As the world is increasingly moving toward a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft continues to invest in our cloud infrastructure to meet current and future growing global demand for our more than 200 cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Azure platform,” explained Christian Belady, general manager, datacenter strategy, planning and development, Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft and Facebook are collaborating on this system to accelerate the development of the next-generation of internet infrastructure and support the explosion of data consumption and rapid growth of their respective cloud and online services.

IANS